Transformers with Learnable Activation Functions

Activation functions can have a significant impact on reducing the topological complexity of input data and therefore, improving a model's performance. However, the choice of activation functions is seldom discussed or explored in Transformer-based language models. As a common practice, commonly used activation functions like Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU) are chosen beforehand and then remain fixed from pre-training to fine-tuning. In this paper, we investigate the impact of activation functions on Transformer-based models by utilizing rational activation functions (RAFs). In contrast to fixed activation functions (FAF), RAFs are capable of learning the optimal activation functions from data. Our experiments show that the RAF-based Transformer model (RAFT) achieves a better performance than its FAF-based counterpart (FAFT). For instance, we find that RAFT outperforms FAFT on the GLUE benchmark by 5.71 points when using only 100 training examples and by 2.05 points on SQuAD with all available data. Analyzing the shapes of the learned RAFs further unveils that they vary across different layers and different tasks; opening a promising way to better analyze and understand large, pre-trained language models.(1)